Manager Select: Investment Management Process

Manager Select provides an in-depth overview of every firm's decision making process and investment philosophy, while also detailing exactly how your company's investment portfolio would actually be managed.

Decision Making Process and Philosophy

Is their process top down or bottom up? Will the portfolio be managed by specific individuals or a large team? These questions are important in understanding exactly how your portfolio would be managed.

Manager Select addresses these questions, while also allowing managers to summarize how a portfolio is invested after being funded, any recent changes in philosophy, and the approach used to implement the strategy decisions in the management of fixed income accounts.

Investment Management Style and Model for Insurers

As Manger Select covers fixed income managers with insurance specialization, we ask firms (if offered) to discuss how their model fixed-income portfolio for insurance companies considers the unique regulatory and cash flow needs of an insurer. This overview includes how this model portfolio differs from their unconstrained model portfolios.

Additionally, we ask managers to describe their investment management style on the total return/book income spectrum and what their firm will do to balance it.

Risk Management Process

Each manager provides an overview of their risk management process, including its organizational structure, reporting relationship and any processes employed to evaluate risks as market conditions change. Should an issue be flagged by Risk Management, the process for resolving the issue is provided as well.

Evaluating the trade-off between risks taken and potential returns can be difficult. To address this, Manager Select asks each firm to detail how they judge this trade off and how this judgement adjusts for insurance companies.